This book comes across as perfunctory and haphazard in its presentation and in the issues it chooses to highlight (quality issues, regulatory concerns, overlap with other emissions markets). Most of the essays are from start-up firms and independent consultants, who all have their own agendas and opinions, which end up giving the book an air of corporate bias. Most essays are rarely longer than two or three pages and feature little to no historical perspective or comparisons to other, established environmental markets. The book itself has only 120 pages worth of raw material; the rest is filler consisting of company descriptions and pithy emissions-reduction project descriptions which one can find anywhere.
Indeed, most of the information in this book can be gleaned from an hour or two surfing the internet at major carbon and "green" sites, as well as company webpages that specialize in carbon emission reductions.
The essays contain a significant amount of overlap and repetition, and none of them are in-depth enough (qualitatively or quantitatively) to offer true insight; none of the articles have raw numbers or charts about pricing and reductions taking place. To make matters worse, much of the material is already out of date, owing to the fast-growing nature of the voluntary carbon market.
Mark Trexler's two essays (about interactions with the renewable energy credit market and about quality control of voluntary credits) are among the best in the book, but why read them here when they are available for free on the internet?
The slapdash nature of the book and the superficial analysis make this book non-critical. I give this book two stars because it at least serves as some type of introduction to the field, though true experts will find nothing of value in the book.
As a final note, the foreword by Al Gore is short, fluffy and only tangentially refers to voluntary carbon markets at the very end. One would be better off reading his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which is far more substantial.